Đề thi vào lớp 10 môn Anh Chuyên - Sở GD&ĐT Đồng Tháp năm 2026

Holidays at home are usually a last recourse when all other options have been ruled out for one reason or another, but, in these tough times when money is perhaps tighter than ever before, the grim reality that the stay-at-home vacation may be the only realistic alternative is one that more and more of us are faced with.

However, this does not have to mean a 8.1 (MISERY) time in the same old surrounds you are in for the other 195-odd days of the year. For those willing to think outside the box a little, there are, in fact, a 8.2 (MULTIPLE) of possibilities that should be explored.

Ever thought about a house swap, for example? The house swap is the ultimate holiday recession buster. And there are now websites on which 8.3 (MIND) individuals, couples and families looking to get a flavor of the life lived in someone else's home can hook up and start house swapping.

Okay, so it's not the two weeks in Gran Canaria you might have hoped for, but staying in someone else's 8.4 (RESIDE) for a few days at least, whether it be ten, fifty or one hundred miles away, sure beats slouching around at home on your own sofa.

Christophe Petyt is sitting in a Paris café, listing the adornments of his private art collection, several Van Goghs, and a comprehensive selection of the better Impressionists. 'I can,' he says quietly, 'really get to know any painting I like, and so can you.' Half an hour later I am sitting in this office with Degas's The Jockeys on my lap. If fine art looks good in a gallery, believe me, it feels even better in your hands. Petyt is the world's leading dealer in fake masterpieces, a man whose activities provoke both admiration and exasperation in the higher levels of the art world. Name the painting and for as little as £1,000 he will deliver you a copy so well executed that even the original artist might have been taken in.

Petyt's company employs over eighty painters, each steeped in the style of a particular artist or school. 'We choose them very carefully,' he says. 'They're usually people with very good technique but not much creativity, who are unlikely to make it as artists in their own right. But they love the great works and have real insight into what's gone into them.' Every work is individually commissioned, using new canvases and traditional oil paints, before being artificially aged by a variety of simple but ingenious techniques.

The notional value of the original is not the determining factor, however, when it comes to setting the retail value of Petyt's paintings. This is actually linked to the amount of effort and expertise that has gone into producing the copy. An obscure miniature may therefore cost much more than a bigger, better-known painting by a grand master. The Degas I'm holding looks as though it came off the artist's easel yesterday. Before being sold it has to be aged, and this, so to speak, is the real 'art' of the copy. A few minutes in a hot oven can put years on a canvas, black tea apparently stains it beautifully and new frames can be buried underground, then sprayed with acid. [I]

The view when Petyt started out was that very little of this could be legal. He was pursued through the French courts by museums and by descendants of the artists, with several major French art dealers cheering from the sidelines. This concern was perhaps understandable in a country that has been rocked by numerous art fraud scandals. 'The establishment was suspicious of us,' huffs Petyt, 'but for the wrong reasons, I think. Some people want to keep all the best art for themselves.' He won the case and as the law now stands, the works and signatures of any artist who has been dead for seventy years can be freely copied. The main proviso is that the copy cannot be passed off to dealers as the real thing. [II] To prevent this, every new painting is indelibly marked on the back of the canvas, and as an additional precaution, a tiny hidden piece of gold leaf is worked into the paint.

Until he started the business ten years ago, Petyt, a former business school student, barely knew one artist from another. Then one particular painting by Van Gogh caught his eye. [III] At $10 million, it was well beyond his reach so he came up with the idea of getting an art student friend to paint him a copy. In an old frame, it looked absolutely wonderful, and Petyt began to wonder what market there might be for it. He picked up a coffee-table book of well-known paintings, earmarked a random selection of works and got his friends to knock them off. 'Within a few months, I had about twenty good copies,' he says, 'so I organized an exhibition. In two weeks, we'd sold the lot, and got commissions for sixty more.' It became clear that a huge and lucrative market existed for faux art.

Petyt's paintings are exhibited away from the traditional art centres in places with lavish houses in need of equally impressive works of art. Although their owners include rock stars, fashion designers and top businesspeople, they either cannot afford or more likely simply cannot obtain great works of art. [IV] 'The best paintings are so valuable,' he explains, 'that it's risky to have them at home and the costs of security and insurance are huge. So some collectors keep the original in a bank vault and hang our copy.'

Is it art? Petyt draws a parallel: 'Take music, for example. Does Celine Dion compose her own tunes, writes her own lyrics? She's interpreting someone else's work, but she's still an artist. Classical musicians often try to produce a sound as close as possible to what they think the composer intended. Nobody's suggesting they are anything but artists. With us, maybe, it's the same.'

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More than eighty years after its first publication, Thach Lam's "Hanoi's 20 Streets" still teaches readers how to see a city. Unlike travel guides that list monuments and museums, this collection of essays captures something more elusive: the soul of Hanoi through everyday moments. A member of the Self-Reliance Literary Group, Thach Lam avoided both grand descriptions and harsh criticism. Instead, he wrote gently about small beauties: the night cries of street vendors on Hang Bac Street, the aroma of early-season sticky rice from Vong Village, and a morning cup of tea. These are not grand events. But together, they form a portrait of a city where elegance hides in simplicity. His approach was unusual for the 1930s and 1924s. While many writers focused on social realism, Thach Lam chose sentimentalism, believing that preserving ordinary beauty was itself an act of resistance.

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Consider how Thach Lam writes about a single dish: bun cha. He wondered why ordinary ingredients - rice noodles, grilled meat, herbs - could create such an extraordinary flavor. His answer reveals his philosophy. The person who first invented bun cha, he argued, deserved recognition as a creative artist. Not a cook, but an artist. The magic lay not in expensive ingredients but in perfect balance: the grilled meat on fresh bamboo skewers, the thinly wrapped noodles, the precisely mixed dipping sauce. And especially the Lang mint - a herb that grows only in Hanoi. Take it anywhere else, Thach Lam noted, and it loses its distinctive scent. For him, bun cha was not fast food. It was a "masterpiece" - rustic yet elegant, ordinary yet irreplaceable.

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The book also traces the rhythm of Tet, Vietnam's lunar New Year, through three acts. Before Tet, the streets buzz with shoppers; the scent of candies, jams, and incense fills every alley. During Tet, Hanoi seems to exhale. Street vendors disappear. Firecrackers echo through quiet neighborhoods. A feeling of togetherness seeps into each home. Then comes the aftermath. Thach Lam captures this with heartbreaking precision: "The joy of Tet has gone with the firecracker remnants that people sweep away, never to return. And so another year has passed." He does not mourn loudly. Instead, he lets the emptiness speak for itself. What makes his writing timeless is this restraint - the ability to describe loss without sentimentality, to feel deeply without shouting.

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Published in 1927, "Hanoi's 20 Streets" contains just fourteen short essays. Yet its influence extends far beyond literature. As Hanoi modernises, expanding streets, erecting high-rises, speeding up daily life, the book is a bridge between past and present. It reminds readers that a city's identity does not reside in concrete structures. It lives in how people love, how they eat, how they greet each other on a quiet morning. Thach Lam teaches us to value the simple beauty around us: a bowl of pho at a street corner, the smile of a vendor, the scent of Lang mint that refuses to grow elsewhere. Seventy-one years after Hanoi's liberation, the soul of the capital still beats in those small moments. Thach Lam simply showed us where to listen.

Across the low-lying coastal regions of Vietnam, a quiet but remarkable change is 25.1 shape. For decades, local communities faced the full 25.2 of ferocious typhoons and rising sea levels, which ate away at their land and threatened their livelihoods. But a strategic move towards ecological restoration has brought a powerful natural defence system: mangrove forests. This layered green canopy does more than just make the shoreline look beautiful. It serves 25.3 an essential buffer zone. By absorbing the energy of powerful waves and trapping sediment in their intricate root networks, these coastal forests hold back erosion effectively. As a result, coastal towns that were 25.4 highly vulnerable to seasonal disasters now enjoy a level of environmental stability they have never known, proving that nature-based solutions can work better than artificial barriers.

Beyond their immediate protective role, these intertidal ecosystems are an unparalleled asset in the global fight against climate change. Mangroves are exceptionally good at pulling carbon dioxide from the air, locking it away in their biomass and the soil beneath for centuries. Scientists call this stored carbon "blue carbon", a resource with immense value in the global carbon market. 25.5 that a single hectare of healthy mangrove forest can store up to ten 25.6 more carbon than a rainforest on land, protecting these habitats is absolutely vital. By contrast, destroying such areas releases huge amounts of greenhouse gases back into the atmosphere, which compounds global warming. So preserving these coastal forests is no longer just a local necessity; it has become a core part of international climate action.